The key to unleashing employee potential lies in establishing the right processes and programs to support leaders and employees at various stages of the HR cycle. The HR cycle is a 12-step process that individuals go through throughout their employment journey from hiring to promotion or role change. In our guide, Using the HR Cycle to Unlock the Potential Within the Organization, we present the strategies and initiatives that HR can pursue to leverage the HR cycle for long-term organizational success.

Recruitment, Orientation, and Onboarding

The recruiting and onboarding steps of the HR cycle present an opportunity for HR to ensure that new hires align to the goals and culture of their organization. The beginning of the HR cycle is the time to examine recruiting activities and ensure they position your organization for future success. During these stages, you can:

• Showcase your culture. Ensure that recruiting activities and tools highlight your culture as much as the details of the position you’re trying to fill. Use your company career page and social media to express to candidates the personality of your organization and aspects of the culture.

• Think about orientation partnerships. When a new hire joins, they need to know where the copier is, but they also need to become acquainted with the leaders on their new team that can help them adjust to cultural and work norms. HR can connect new hires with the leaders who will support their success.

• Train managers to be master communicators. There are many stakeholders in a new hire’s orientation, but people managers have a special role to play in communicating performance objectives and expectations. HR can provide the tools and training support to ensure managers communicate expectations with ease.

Safety in the workplace is a critically important issue, particularly in industries such as construction, manufacturing, mining, and healthcare. According to the National Safety Council, every seven seconds, a worker is injured on the job, leading to loss of productivity, missed days at work, or even loss of life. Although it’s true that individuals must adhere to safety regulations and wear proper safety equipment, having a culture of safety will ensure that employees not only follow safety rules but also are fully committed to achieving safety in the workplace.

Building a culture of safety is a powerful way to ensure that every individual at every level in the organization takes personal accountability for the safety of each other, patients, and the general public. Here are four ways to build a culture of safety.

Create a Roadmap for Change

To fully achieve a culture of safety, you first need to understand your current reality. Surveys and focus groups are two ways to understand current employee attitudes about safety and to identify specific challenges and opportunities related to changing the culture. Creating a roadmap for culture change also requires a clearly articulated safety objective. Whether your goal is to become the industry leader for safety or to reduce illness and injury in the workplace by a specific amount, it will be important to clearly state the goal and the metrics you will use to chart progress. That way, everyone can recognize and celebrate success when you get there.

Ensure Leadership Support

Individuals on the front lines who are working directly with patients, hazardous materials, or heavy machinery are not the only ones responsible for ensuring safety in the workplace. In fact, leaders have a critical role to play in building a culture of safety, including:

• Championing safety as a critical aspect of ongoing company success through regular digital and in-person communication
• Dedicating sufficient resources to equip the workforce with the knowledge and skills they need to ensure safety
• Recognizing employees whose behaviors align with the company’s safety culture goals

Build Knowledge and Skills Through Training

To build a culture of safety, you need more than a traditional safety training program. Traditional training programs are great for providing instruction on how to use equipment or follow certain procedures, but they won’t bring about true culture transformation. To achieve a shift in culture, it’s necessary to provide employees with learning experiences that enable them to think differently about safety and take ownership of their role in creating a culture of safety. When employees attend training that focuses on building a safety mindset, they develop a strong conviction for promoting safety and learn how to:

• Adopt shared responsibility for safety in the workplace
• Take actions that ensure their safety and that of others
• Proactively suggest ways to improve safety through improvements to existing processes and protocols

Measure Results and Reinforce

Any culture change effort requires ongoing reinforcement to ensure individuals retain lessons learned in training and don’t fall back into old habits. Digital learning reinforcement, assessments, and coaching from company leaders will help to ensure the safety culture becomes further embedded in everyday employee activities. Reinforcement activities aren’t meant to teach new information or add more to employees’ workloads. Rather, they should be designed to reinforce what was taught in training, in bite-sized increments over time, so that individuals can incorporate those reinforced lessons into their workdays. In partnership with reinforcement activities, ongoing measurement of results based on clear metrics will help everyone recognize and measure progress.

Meeting your workplace safety goals can be a reality when employees and leaders work together to demonstrate their commitment to a culture of safety. With a roadmap to success, the support of leaders, and training that helps develop a new safety mindset, everyone in the organization will be equipped to improve safety in all areas.

Contents

• Enthusiasm
• Consistency
• Unity
• Set the Expectation Early

Introduction

When people think about what makes a great team great, they often gloss over “effort.” After all, it seems a bit obvious to say that a team can only succeed by putting in hard work.

But for teamwork in the workplace to be truly effective, the definition of team effort must extend beyond “working hard.” Effective effort involves three key components: enthusiasm, consistency, and a united commitment. In fact, consistent, united, and enthusiastic effort is so important to team success that we’ve named it one of our “seven cornerstones of teamwork,” which make up the foundation for exceptional teamwork in the workplace. Read on to see which component of effort your team might be missing:

Enthusiasm

Armed with shiny, new resources (or budgets) and a well-defined goal, teams often start off incredibly excited to tackle the task at hand. That excitement, however, comes in waves—morale is high at the launch of the project and gets another boost at the completion of big phases, but it dissipates between these peaks when the hard work must be put in. Unfortunately, that’s when teams need an injection of enthusiasm the most!

When it comes to customer centricity, skill set and mindset go hand in hand. By fostering one without the other, you will probably see incremental improvements. However, if you want to implement a culture of customer centricity at your organization, building skills and shifting mindsets must be done in tandem. Let’s take a look at the two approaches and how you can tie them together.

Customer Centricity Skills

Successfully serving customers requires certain technical skills that will vary depending on your industry, but there are some universal skills that everybody should learn if you truly want to put the customer first:

• See the business through the lens of the customer experience – This might seem like a simple task, but it actually does take practice for it to come naturally. Individuals in the organization make choices all the time. You want them to make those choices by first asking, “How might this impact our customers?”
• Identify areas of personal responsibility – Everybody is busy, and it’s easy to ignore tasks when it’s not clear whose responsibility they are. Understanding the impacts of taking responsibility (or not) is a skill that can be honed. The more people in the company who possess this skill, the more proactive the entire team will be.
• Take personal action when appropriate – After identifying areas of personal responsibility, it’s time to take action. This is also a skill because it requires understanding the decision-making paths, knowing which barriers stand in the way, and how to overcome them.

All of these skills can be taught and improved over time. However, without building a foundation of a customer centricity mindset, people will be less likely to employ those skills in the workplace.

Customer Centricity Mindset

Creating a customer centricity mindset is a matter of shifting perspectives and ingraining them in the company culture. Some of the factors that contribute to this are:

• Understanding the big picture – Many individuals don’t realize just how much potential they have to impact the customer experience and the organization as a whole. Even people who do not typically interact with customers can influence their experience. Bringing this to light can help shift the perspective from an internal one to considering the customer’s experience in everything you do.

• Feeling empowered to make a difference – The value of understanding the big picture cannot be underestimated, because it can elicit possibilities that leadership might never have considered. For example, in a customer centric culture, a website developer (who never interacts with customers) might take extra care to make an online purchase flow as smooth and fast as possible in an effort to make the customer experience better.

• Feeling invested in the outcomes – When individuals realize that they can indeed have an impact, they are more inclined to feel invested in the outcomes. That same website developer has a choice when working on the purchase flow. He or she can implement an out-of-the-box solution, or he or she can consider the customer’s perspective and create a tailored experience that is designed to delight them. Because he or she is invested in the outcomes, he or she will choose the solution that best serves the customer.

Anybody can adopt this mindset, but without the necessary skills to execute, an initiative to promote customer centricity will fall flat. Individuals need both the internal motivation (mindset) and the ability to execute their ideas (skills). Building customer centricity skills also helps individuals adopt the mindset through regular practice and successes that make them want to continue on that path.

A high performance culture is at the top of many companies’ wish lists, with good reason — when colleagues contribute fully to the best of their abilities (and even stretch those abilities to become better), the company benefits. Unfortunately, leaders are facing an uphill battle in implementing a high performance culture since, according to one survey, just 10 percent of employees define success at work through high performance.

Successfully implementing a high performance culture is most certainly a reason to rejoice, given the obstacles that are in the way when creating it. However, developing the culture isn’t a “set it and forget it” exercise; to continually reap the benefits of a high performance culture, you must find ways to sustain this culture through all of your company’s ups and downs. Here are four keys to sustaining the high performance culture you’ve worked hard to put in place:

1. Leaders Must Model High Performance Behaviors

Sustaining a high performance culture starts with leaders. A company’s leaders should be the living embodiment of the company’s values, and how leaders act — and how often they show their faces outside the boardroom — has a tremendous impact on the behavior of their teams.  Researchers have even found that nonverbal cues from leaders (how they stand, how often they smile, whether they cross their arms, etc.) dictate whether their team members open up or shut down when approached.

While the leadership team may say they value honest feedback, their body language itself may tell employees something completely different. For a high performance culture that lasts, leaders must consciously embody the values and behaviors they hope to see in their own employees.

2. High Performance Culture Requires High Performance Training

A high performance culture supports the development of skills and knowledge through engaging, impactful training programs. Unfortunately, after we learn something, we all experience “learning decay” — we remember less and less of the lesson over time.

To ensure you’re fostering a high performance culture, invest in high performance training strategies that improve the likelihood that the training will stick. For example, experiential learning, where training participants take an active role in a training experience (instead of listening to a lecturer or reading a manual) greatly minimizes learning decay in comparison to more traditional training programs, like “show and tell” presentations which require minimal engagement. High performance training exercises that simulate the real-world workplace scenarios that participants often encounter make it far easier for participants to remember and apply the training lessons in their day-to-day work lives.

3. Confidence, Not Perfection is the Goal

In a culture of high performance, teams still make mistakes — the difference is how quickly they bounce back from those mistakes and continue to move forward. Colleagues in a high-performance culture will analyze what went wrong and make adjustments, rather than abandoning a plan completely in a fit of passion (or embarrassment). Plus, a hallmark of a high performance culture is a focus on collaboration: if one colleague makes a mistake, another is there to pick up the slack and keep a project moving. Empower your colleagues to collaborate, not compete, and to tackle problems (even problems of their own making) with confidence, not a sense a failure.

4. High Performers Focus on Building Strengths, Not Eliminating Weaknesses

Continually focusing on what colleagues are doing wrong results in a culture of demoralization — it’s hard to keep your head up and perform to your fullest potential when you’re constantly being berated! Instead, the focus should be on identifying and further developing strengths. In fact, a study found that when individuals are able to use their strengths on the job every day, they’re six times as likely to be engaged in their work than those who do not — and you cannot sustain a high performance culture without sustained engagement as well.

Inevitably, over time a pillar of your high performance culture may show signs of cracking. What strategies have you implemented to avoid crumbling and continue to sustain an engaged, high performance culture at your company?

Effective time management benefits everyone in an organization. More specifically, sales professionals that manage their time effectively benefit from less stress, better quality work, improved productivity, and more quickly achieved goals.

For B2B sales professionals, better productivity translates to more sales, and one way to increase productivity is through effective time management. Here are six time management tips you can put to use today:

1. Start with a Daily Plan

Make a daily to-do list. This may seem like an obvious strategy, but many people don’t do it. Every morning, or the evening before, plan your day and stick to it as closely as possible. Schedule tasks that you will focus on throughout the day based on importance and urgency. When possible, carve out time slots for each task so you can focus without interruption for the necessary amount of time.

2. Set Priorities

Identify the top priorities for the day and don’t allow yourself to get distracted with smaller, less important tasks until the top priorities are under control. Write down the tasks that must get done and the ones you would like to get done. Start at the top and work your way through the most urgent tasks first. For B2B sales, this includes account planning strategy, focusing on decision makers, and prioritizing the leads that are most likely to convert.

3. Take Frequent Breaks

One study found that the top performing 10 percent of employees had a tendency to work for 52 consecutive minutes followed by a 17-minute break. While this specific schedule might not work for you, it illustrates the importance of taking breaks. Schedule breaks into your day at a frequency that makes sense for you and protect that time. Pause between tasks to refresh your brain and get ready for the next item on your list. This often means stepping away from your desk so you don’t get drawn back into working before you’re ready to start again.

4. Work Smarter, Not Longer

According to a Stanford University study, productivity drops off sharply after a 50-hour workweek and is essentially nonexistent after 55 hours. Continued long hours are also correlated to absenteeism and turnover. If you can’t complete your necessary work in less than 50 hours, it may be time to consider more strict time management, training to improve, or a discussion with your leader to figure out the root cause of the problem and strategize how to make your workweek more manageable and productive. Use the sales tools at your disposal (CRM, reporting software, and so on) and don’t assume that you can remember it all. The tools are there for a reason, and the more you utilize them, the more productive you will be.

5. Set Boundaries

Social interactions in the workplace can have a positive impact, but not when they become distractions. Urgent requests can also take time away from important ones. Set boundaries that define when it’s okay to be interrupted and when you need to focus. If you have an office, it could be as simple as closing your door for certain periods during the day. In an open office, use indicators like headphones or a sign that says you don’t want to be interrupted and set office hours for the times in which you welcome employee interaction. If you are interrupted and the issue is not actually urgent, schedule a time to discuss it and return to the task at hand. Coworkers will eventually tailor their behaviors around your cues.

6. Focus on Your Weaknesses

When trying to get better at time management, identify the areas where you feel the weakest and focus on improving them one at a time. For example, if you know you’re bad at taking breaks, set a timer. If you like to socialize at work, do it only during breaks or schedule coffee with a coworker rather than having an impromptu chat. By improving your weaknesses, you will become a more well-rounded sales professional who is able to manage priorities, achieve (and exceed) client needs, and work productively to achieve the results you need.

Developing new habits for managing your time takes some initial effort, but when they become second nature you will find yourself less stressed, more productive, and ultimately, with better sales numbers.

When you think of organizational development, you might imagine a team of high-level managers gathering a few times a year to create and implement a strategy that includes training programs, benchmarks, and reporting systems. While this is certainly a valuable approach, it’s not the only one. Many organizations are discovering that employee development can—and should—be driven not only by leadership, but also by the employees themselves.

Employee-driven development is beneficial to organizations of all sizes. When individuals define their own paths at an organization, they tend to stay longer because they know where they are headed and that their destination is in line with their career aspirations. Employees also stay more engaged when they are active participants in their own development. A recent study showed that almost half of employees in the U.S. are not engaged at work, primarily because they wanted to learn something new. If that need isn’t met in your organization, chances are employees will find it elsewhere.

If you’re not already factoring individual goals into your organizational development plan, it might be time to introduce employee-driven development. Here’s how to get started.

Let Employees Lead the Way

Collaborate with individuals as they set their own goals for career development. When managers set goals for employees, it can lead to missed opportunities because they don’t necessarily know what employees want or what their capabilities are. On the other hand, when employees are given the latitude to define their own paths, the result is a higher level of engagement and more people in the right roles doing what they enjoy.

Of course, the majority of these individual goals must also benefit the organization and support the business objectives. Start by clearly stating the organization’s goals and asking the employees to set their goals to support these.

Provide the Necessary Resources

After defining individual goals, the organization should offer support by providing access to the necessary resources. These might include:

• Funds for outside training
• Internal training programs
• Membership in professional organizations
• Mentoring and coaching
• Recommended resources
• Peer discussion groups

Knowing how to provide meaningful feedback and accepting honest evaluations from others are essential skills for employee-driven development. Providing training for these fundamental competencies will give individuals a strong foundation for participating in their own development.

Maintain a Dialogue

Employee development is not a single training event or feedback provided during an annual review. The plan should consist of short- and long-term goals with realistic, achievable milestones. Ongoing communication is also essential for the success of any type of development program. Even when employees are leading the charge by setting their own career goals and being proactive about accessing resources, they need coaching and feedback from their managers about their progress.

It’s important for the organization to have a two-way communication process that allows both employees and managers to voice their desires and concerns. It’s not enough to assume that employees will speak up when they have ideas or criticisms. Open communication has to be built into the company culture and employees must be provided with mechanisms (surveys, 360 evaluations, and so forth) for providing feedback.

Build it into Your Hiring Process

Before an employee is even hired, you have the opportunity to set expectations about learning and development. If self-learning is an important company value, that should be communicated to candidates during the interview process. This approach brings self-starters to the forefront because they will be seeking opportunities for growth. Employee-driven development will help you attract and retain the high-potential individuals who want knowledge and a level of control over the future of their careers.

Of course, employee development is not a one-sided equation. Leadership still needs to guide the overall strategy so that any development programs align with and support business goals. Striking the right balance between what each employee wants and what the organization needs is crucial.

For many businesses, success depends on sales, whether they are made to other businesses or to individual customers. This is one reason why creating a positive customer experience from beginning to end is so important. To do this effectively, you need every individual in your organization on board, even if they don’t interact directly with customers. Every employee must know that no matter what their role is within the company, each person affects the customer experience.

Achieving this type of culture doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a strong commitment from leadership and a sustained effort to shift the hearts and minds of every individual to behave in a customer centric way. The results of these efforts will speak for themselves when the organization becomes more successful.

Why Success Starts with a Superior Customer Experience

Companies today have to provide more than just a good product or service. Customers expect more, and if they’re not getting what they want from your organization, they’ll turn to another company to find it.

Customers Want It

Although the quality of the products or services you deliver is important, it might not be the deciding factor when customers make a purchase. Competitive pricing is also a consideration, but not necessarily the only one. In fact, one study showed that the customer experience is expected to be more important than either price or product by the year 2020, which is just around the corner.

Innovation, quality of products and services, and other factors will always play a role in the success of a company, but the customer experience has become a significant deciding factor that will ultimately impact the bottom line. If you’re not already paying attention to the B2B customer experience your company provides, your organization is at risk of getting left behind.

Businesses Benefit from It

The ROI of the customer experience is not easy to quantify, but a recent report from Qualtrics analyzed feedback from 10,000 customers and found that for a $1 billion company, even a moderate improvement in the customer experience would impact its revenue by an average of $775 million over three years. This is not an insignificant number for any organization, especially considering this is for a moderate improvement. Imagine what a major commitment to improving the customer experience could do for your company’s revenue.

The report also found a strong correlation between the customer experience and the decision to repurchase from a company. This is important because it is easier (and less expensive) to make sales to existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Keeping your current customers delighted with both your products and the experience they have while purchasing them will only add to your bottom line.

The Customer Experience Goes Beyond Customer Service

Many companies make the mistake of focusing only on the customer service department or the employees who interact directly with customers. The reality is that every individual in the organization has the power to impact the customer experience. The software developers who create the website, the individuals who work on a manufacturing line, and the team that sends invoices all make decisions on a regular basis that have the potential to impact how customers interact with the company and perceive the brand.

Focusing on creating a customer centric culture rather than just on providing customer service training will help ensure that the customer is top of mind when any decision, no matter how big or small, is made.

Becoming Customer Centric Requires a Culture Shift

Your organization can achieve a culture of customer centricity by setting a clear goal, having a strategy that supports it, and ensuring a commitment from leadership to invest the necessary resources to maintain the momentum. Experiential learning is one of the many tools that can be used to create conviction and teach people the skills and competencies necessary for supporting a customer centric culture. By directly experiencing the consequences of their actions in a time-compressed setting, participants leave with the conviction that their behavior truly does matter. This knowledge carries through to the real world and influences the daily decisions that have the potential to impact the customer experience.

Businesses rely on customers in order to be successful, and the customer experience is more important now than ever. The organizations that don’t recognize this or fail to make an investment in customer centricity risk losing market share. To learn more about how your company can stay competitive in the new customer centric landscape, read our free guide, The Rise of the Customer Experience in B2B.

Contents

• Understand the Importance of Leadership
• Create Unanimous Focus on a Common Goal
• Clearly Define Roles in Subgroups
• Tap into Your Shared Resources
• Use Frequent and Effective Communication
• Offer Enthusiastic, Consistent, and United Effort
• Employ Periodic and Temporary Suppression of the Ego

Off the top of your head, you can probably think of at least a few ways that teamwork in your workplace has fallen short. The team may have missed a deadline or failed to meet a set objective. Regardless of what happened, when these incidents happen it is a usually a sign that teamwork and collaboration are not functioning properly. Even when a team’s efforts lead to seemingly good results, there are often plenty of missed opportunities because of issues such as:

• Not every voice on the team was heard.
• Communication roadblocks prevented good ideas from coming to fruition.
• Subgroups went in a direction that didn’t support the team’s objective.
• The team fizzled because there wasn’t a consistent and united effort.

If any of these issues sound familiar, it might be time to take steps to improve teamwork. Effective teamwork doesn’t happen overnight. It takes intentional effort and a thorough understanding of what teamwork actually is.

Below are seven cornerstones to improve teamwork in your organization, along with links to resources that will help you learn more.

1. Understand the Importance of Leadership

Every team needs a leader to encourage accountability, model empowerment, facilitate streamlined decision-making, and maintain momentum. However, the appropriate team leader isn’t always the person you first expect. Team leaders are typically individuals who know the most about the project—which means they might not have extensive experience with leading. They might not even be the person with the most ‘senior’ rank in the room. That’s why building in leadership skills exercises into your teamwork training in the workplace is so important.

The role of a team leader extends beyond conducting everyday meetings and capturing action items. The person in a leadership role must recognize their importance, model the expected behaviors, and understand how to harness individual strengths to achieve the outlined objectives.

2. Create Unanimous Focus on a Common Goal

When teams get distracted and stray away from the defined objectives, the project will take longer, or worse, never be fully achieved. Even when teams are working on a simple project, team members still need to see it as their own project. But for that project to truly be the best it can be, each person on the team must have a unanimous focus on a common goal.

It’s not uncommon for the individuals in a team to be pulled in multiple directions. They have daily tasks that must be completed, long-term projects to move along, and departmental objectives to bear in mind. Clearly articulating and repeating the team’s common goal can help the group maintain focus, especially between meetings.

3. Clearly Define Roles in Subgroups

When a team is faced with a large goal, it’s best practice to create smaller teams, or subgroups, within the project to address more specific tasks that support the overall goal. The goal of a subgroup is also more tightly focused than the overall team goal. This means less input from higher-ranking members who are most enthusiastic about the ‘big picture’. Instead, subgroup members with specialized knowledge will steer the subgroup towards its goal.

Subgroups should operate as mini-teams, using all seven of these cornerstones in their own work. Each subgroup needs its own leader, a unanimous focus on a common goal, and so on. They must also be subordinate to the larger team, always supporting the larger goal.

4. Tap into Your Shared Resources

Many people only consider hard resources—money,  equipment, technology, and so on—when thinking about the resources that are shared among a team. However, soft resources can be just as important when cataloging your inventory of shared resources. While they might not seem like elements that must be shared for team success, but think about what would happen if just one person was passionate about the team project, or if only one person ever tried to overcome the inevitable project hurdles that sprung up. Just as when hard resources aren’t spread around equitably, it’s unlikely that project would ever be completed.

In a work environment where budgets are closely followed and individual productivity is valued, it can be culturally challenging to effectively share resources, both hard and soft. Organizations that are committed to improving teamwork must make it clear that team members have access to the resources they need in order to accomplish their goals.

5. Use Frequent and Effective Communication

Every individual on a team must always be able to say, “I know what I need to know,” and, “I understand everything.” If these two statements are not true at any given time, there is potential for the team to break down. The keys to communication in a team are for it to be both frequent and effective. And remember that effective communication requires all team members to know on a high level what’s going on within the team, but also to truly comprehend what’s going on.

Effective communication in a team requires both the right skills and the right tools. Ongoing training can help build the necessary skills to improve teamwork, such as active listening, giving feedback, and creating an environment in which people are comfortable speaking up. The right tools will depend on the team, but could include a document management system, an internal messaging platform, or a system for sharing and storing meeting notes.

6. Offer Enthusiastic, Consistent, and United Effort

The whole point of creating a team is to accomplish a specific goal. This requires effort on everyone’s part, but unless that effort meets certain criteria, you’ll soon find yourself spinning wheels. Putting in consistent, united, enthusiastic effort should be a given for every employee—but, unfortunately, that’s not always the case. That’s why team leaders must be up front about the level of personal commitment and discipline that will be expected of each member.

In addition to articulating the need for this type of effort, team leaders must also model the desired behavior. If team members see that their leader isn’t accountable for his or her commitments or makes excuses for substandard work, they will eventually conclude that this is acceptable behavior and reflect their leader’s level of effort.

7. Employ Periodic and Temporary Suppression of the Ego

Essentially, the principle of teamwork related to ego is about ensuring that individual agendas don’t take over the team’s goals, inhibit other team members’ contribution, or development and create a cycle of diminishing team effectiveness. No team will succeed if it is composed of members with a “me first” attitude. Successful teamwork depends on every individual feeling that their contribution matters.

Keeping egos in check without quashing them requires a delicate balance. Everybody on the team must intentionally manage their ego and shift the focus from individual agendas to the team’s objectives to effectively achieve the desired outcome.

Next Steps to Improving Teamwork in the Workplace

While the teams in your organization might have mastered some elements of this list, it is important to understand that in order to improve teamwork in the workplace it cannot be done alone. So, if you are committed to creating a workplace where teamwork thrives, start by performing an assessment of to determine which areas could improve. You will inevitably find a few gaps. When you do, provide competency development to bring all seven cornerstones into balance and see how the organizations in your team transform.

The relentless pace of change in the corporate world today requires teams to collaborate and innovate. Therefore, company culture must overcome silos and support effective, cross-functional interaction between teams. When teams break out of their silos, the organization has a better chance for long-term success. In a survey of global operations managers, 61 percent cited cross-functional collaboration as being the key to helping the company reach strategic goals. Here are six strategies that can help break down silos and foster greater cross-functional collaboration across the entire organization:

Communicate a Unified Vision

Often, organizational silos form because individual or departmental goals have become such a priority that they become all-important, causing employees to lose sight of broader company goals and purpose. A unified vision that is broadly communicated among employees helps individuals to understand that individual and team goals are secondary to organizational vision.

For organizations that have grown accustomed to operating in silos, the vision will need to be communicated often and across different mediums so that it remains top of mind. When people see the bigger picture, they can begin to understand their unique place in the organization, as well as that of others. In time, a focus on self and team will expand to include other individuals and teams that are also part of the company vision.

Create Shared Accountabilities

Once a unifying vision has been established and communicated, it needs to translate into the everyday behaviors of teams and individuals to take hold. Teams can benefit from having shared goals that pull them together rather than divide them. For example, an organization might align the IT department’s goals with those of other departments to ensure more efficient use of internal IT systems. To further break down organizational silos, it can also be helpful to have two or more teams work together on a task force that ends with a joint presentation to senior management.

Bring Teams Together

Breaking down organizational silos and increasing cross-team collaboration doesn’t happen on its own, but will be more likely when individuals have opportunities to interact and work together. Joint meetings, focus groups, and chat sessions can provide employees with opportunities to get to know people from other teams, who does what, and how they can help each other to achieve company goals. Other activities that bring teams together include combining similar teams under co-heads, or co-locating teams that can benefit from being in close physical proximity, as in the case of companies that sit sales and marketing teams together. Organizing a corporate events can also promote collaboration, build trust, and encourage relationships between teams.

Get Leaders On Board

People on different teams will be unlikely to collaborate and will remain in silos unless they see leaders modeling collaborative behavior. Company leaders need to set the example to demonstrate that they expect cross-functional teamwork and information sharing from their employees. Leaders can support greater collaboration in the following ways:

• Talk about shared goals between teams
• Assign a team member or two to keep another team in the loop on a key project
• Regularly communicate and spend time with leaders of other teams
• Recognize and reward individuals who demonstrate collaboration with other teams

Incorporate Collaboration Tools

In the digital age, there is a range of workplace collaboration tools that can bring teams together in the cloud, making it easier to share ideas and information. Digital collaboration tools can be particularly helpful in unifying remote teams and individuals. Some examples include:

• Project management platforms with chat and virtual whiteboard capabilities
• Shared documents that allow multiple teams to access and collaborate
  on presentations, proposals, and project plans
• Data management tools that incorporate data from other platforms—for example, a CRM that integrates with company dashboards used by various teams

Shift Mindsets and Behavior with Training

A great way to help employees break free from silos is to train them to engage in behaviors that support more teamwork and collaboration. With the help of accountability, communication, and leadership training to name a few, employees can learn more about the dangers of silos, see the benefits of collaboration, and practice useful techniques for breaking down silos back on the job.

Organizational silos stand in the way of innovation and growth. They also limit the success of individuals, preventing them from realizing the positive benefits of teamwork and collaboration. By using strategies that encourage individuals to think of themselves as part of the broader organizational team, more cross-functional collaboration can become a reality.